Comment by TeMPOraL

8 months ago

Going by the standard of "But there are also local tools generated faster than you could adjust existing tools to do what you want", here's a random one of mine that's in regular use by my wife:

https://github.com/TeMPOraL/qr-code-generator

Built with Aider and either Sonnet 3.5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro (I forgot to note that down in this project), and recently modified with Claude Code because I had to test it on something.

Getting the first version of this up was literally both faster and easier than finding a QR code generator that I'm sure is not bloated, not bullshit, not loaded with trackers, that's not using shorteners or its own URL (it's always a stupid idea to use URL shorteners you don't control), not showing ads, mining bitcoin and shit, one that my wife can use in her workflow without being distracted too much. Static page, domain I own, a bit of fiddling with LLMs.

What I can't link to is half a dozen single-use tools or faux tools created on the fly as part of working on something. But this happens to me couple times a month.

To anchor another vertex in this parameter space, I found it easier and faster to ask LLM to build me a "breathing timer" (one that counts down N seconds and resets, repeatedly) with analog indicator by requesting it, because a search query to Google/Kagi would be of comparable length, and then I'd have to click on results!

EDIT: Okay, another example:

https://github.com/TeMPOraL/tampermonkey-scripts/blob/master...

It overlays a trivial UI to set up looping over a segment of any YouTube video, and automatically persists the setting by video ID. It solves the trivial annoyance of channel jingles and other bullshit at start/end of videos that I use repeatedly as background music.

This was mostly done zero-shot by Claude, with maybe two or three requests for corrections/extra features, total development time maybe 15 minutes. I use it every day all the time ever since.

You could say, "but SponsorBlock" or whatever, but per what GP wrote, I just needed a small fraction of functionality of the tools I know exist, and it was trivial to generate that with AI.

11 comments

TeMPOraL

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alganet  8 months ago

Your QR generator is actually a project written by humans repackaged:

https://github.com/neocotic/qrious

All the hard work was made by humans.

I can do `npm install` without having to pay for AI, thanks.

  • ben_w  8 months ago

    I am reminded of a meme about musicians. Not well enough to find it, but it was something like this:

      Real musicians don’t mix loops they bought.
  Real musicians make their own synth patches.
  Real musicians build their own instruments.
  Real musicians hand-forge every metal component in their instruments.
  …
  They say real musicians raise goats for the leather for the drum-skins, but I wouldn't know because I haven’t made any music in months and the goats smell funny.

    There's two points here:

    1) even though most of people on here know what npm is, many of us are not web developers and don't really know how to turn a random package into a useful webapp.

    2) The AI is faster than googling a finished product that already exists, not just as an NPM package, but as a complete website.

    Especially because search results require you to go through all the popups everyone stuffs everywhere because cookies, ads, before you even find out if it was actually a scam where the website you went to first doesn't actually do the right thing (or perhaps *anything*) anyway.

    It is also, for many of us, the same price: free.

    • latexr  8 months ago

      > I am reminded of a meme about musicians. Not well enough to find it

      You only need to search for “loops goat skin”. You’re butchering the quote and its meaning quite a bit. The widely circulated version is:

      > I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.

      It’s not about “real musicians”¹ but a personal reflection on dependencies and abstractions and the nature of creative work and remixing. Your interpretation of it is backwards.

      ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

    • alganet  8 months ago

      Ice Ice Baby getting the bass riff of Under Pressure is sampling. Making a cover is covering. Milli Vanilli is another completely different situation.

      I am sorry, none of your points are made. Makes no sense.

      The LLM work sounds dumb, and the suggestion that it made "a qr code generator" is disingenuous. The LLM barely did a frontend for it. Barely.

      Regarding the "free" price, read the comment I replied on again:

      > Built with Aider and either Sonnet 3.5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro

      Paid tools.

      It sounds like the author payed for `npm install`, and thinks he's on top of things and being smart.

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